I see it has just been announced that Robert Vesco died on 23rd November 2007. He fled to Cuba threatening to disclose information about the Republican Party if he was extradited to the US. Vesco knew that Castro would refuse to do anything that appeared to be helping the US: "My enemy's enemy is my friend". In August 1996 was jailed for 13 years by Cuba over a wonder cure "TX" for cancer scam. According to the Cuban authorities he was released just before his death.

From The Times
May 12, 2008
Robert Vesco
American fraudster who fled to Cuba to escape capture by the FBI

Robert Vesco

Robert Vesco’s reputation as a man of mystery lived on after him: it took his wife six months to confirm that he had died in Cuba last November — and even then not everybody believed her.

The communist island may seem an odd place for an American financier to choose as his final resting place, but Vesco was a very unusual financier. He is said to have fraudulently accumulated a fortune in the early 1970s, the whereabouts of which will probably, like many details of his life, remain a mystery.

Vesco’s colourful career included making illegal contributions to Richard Nixon’s 1972 presidential re-election campaign, attempting to buy a Caribbean island and turn it into a sovereign state, and hatching a scheme to sell aircraft to the Libyan government while US officials looked the other way. What turned him into a fugitive from justice for the rest of his life was a $200 million stock swindle at the expense of gullible US investors.

Cuba was Vesco’s final destination, after spending time in Costa Rica and other countries that did not have extradition agreements with the US. He was given refuge by Fidel Castro’s government, but Vesco was not destined to enjoy a quiet life even there. He spent almost a decade in one of the island’s prisons, apparently for his part in a ruse to market a “miracle” drug that turned out to be no such thing.

The ebullient, chain-smoking Vesco seems to have pushed his luck beyond breaking point by involving a member of the Castro family in the fraudulent scheme. He managed to keep a low profile after his release — so low that his death was not reported in the Cuban media — and escaped the attention of the outside world, including the FBI, who were still on his trail.

They had nearly caught up with him in Costa Rica in 1978, but he managed to give them the slip. He lived in the Central American country for almost six years, enjoying a close friendship with President José Figueres (1970-74), whose business ventures he helped to fund. In return, Figueres sponsored legislation to make Vesco immune from extradition.

Vesco lived well in Costa Rica, with a mansion in the capital, San José, and a huge cattle ranch in the interior. He took care to buy friends in the political parties, and was tolerated by Figueres’s successor, Daniel Oduber. But, not for the first or last time, Vesco overreached himself. His profile was too high, his past too controversial, and he became an issue in the 1978 presidential election, which was won by the opposition. Oduber’s successor, President Rodrigo Carazo, repealed the “Vesco Law”, making him vulnerable to extradition, and he was forced to depart hastily for the Bahamas, then Antigua, where he tried unsuccessfully to buy the associated island of Barbuda. There followed several years of peripatetic existence, until he turned up in Havana in 1982. There he was granted asylum for “humanitarian” reasons, assumed the identity of Tom Adams, a Canadian, and lived a comfortable life under government protection.

The Cuban Government’s benevolence did not waver even when Vesco was named in a 1989 Florida trial as an associate of the Colombian drug baron Carlos Lehder, who had been shipping cocaine into the US from his own private island in the Bahamas. But his alleged attempt to swindle the health ministry, and, more particularly, a biotechnology research company run by Fidel Castro’s nephew, with an untested drug that would allegedly cure everything from Aids to arthritis, proved too much even for the Cubans. The charges against him originally included acting as a “provocateur and agent of foreign special services”, but they were mysteriously reduced to “fraud and illicit economic activity”, for which he was sentenced to 13 years in prison in 1996. He was released in 2005, and thereafter lived a very quiet life indeed.

Robert Lee Vesco was born in Detroit in 1936, the son of a car worker. He dropped out of school early, and was said to have got a job in a local car assembly plant by lying about his age. He later moved to New Jersey to work for a machine tools manufacturer, which soon went bankrupt. He took over the company, changed its name to the International Controls Corporation, and by 1968 he was a self-made millionaire, with an airline and several manufacturing plants in his portfolio.

In 1970 Vesco bought, for a song, a troubled Geneva-based mutual fund, Bernard Cornfeld’s Investment Overseas Services (IOS), to the relief of its investors, who looked to Vesco as their saviour. Instead of rescuing them, however, he helped himself to their money so brazenly that the US Securities and Exchange Commission finally intervened and, in 1972, charged him with stealing more than $224 million. By that time Vesco was in the Bahamas, en route to Costa Rica and temporary safety.

Vesco’s Cuban widow, Lidia Alfonso Llaguer, who was also jailed for her part in the wonder drug scheme, finally confirmed his death to the Spanish news agency EFE on May 5, and The New York Times tracked his body down to an unmarked grave in Colón cemetery in Havana.

Mrs Vesco insisted that she had no idea about the money her husband was said to have salted away, saying that he had been penniless when she met him in 1994.

Robert Vesco, American financier and conman, was born on December 4, 1935. He died of lung cancer on November 23, 2007, aged 72